Williamsburg

This guide to Williamsburg in New York starts with the 284 workers who walked off the Havemeyer sugar refinery's waterfront in 1999, in a strike that ran past six hundred days, the longest in the city's history. It reaches back to the refinery's rise from the 1850s, when it refined more than half the sugar in the country, and traces what its union workforce and their neighborhood looked like at its height. Alongside that story, it follows the artists who moved into the same neighborhood's empty factory lofts through the 1990s, and how the L train's first stop out of Manhattan became their artery into the city.